MaxxTow Off-Road Light Bar Installation - 2021 Ford F-450 Cab and Chassis

How to Install the MaxxTow Off-Road Light Bar on a 2021 Ford F-450 Cab and Chassis

Hi there 4Runners. Today in your 2021 Ford 450, we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install MaxxTow's LED light bar. And this is what our light bar looks like when it's installed. We add a 60 led light bar that's gonna provide a flood and spot function. We can see that the outer diodes are gonna give us a wider spread while in the middle, we're gonna get a nice far distance spot so we can easily see out into the distance. And you can see here on the front of the Ford bumper here, we've got a nice large opening that allows our light to fit right in there.

The brackets that come included with it are pretty close to the right height that puts it up. It's right, we're just using all the factory hardware that it came with here to mount this up right in behind this opening. And you can see it's pretty done close to lining up. All of our lights are gonna be able to pass through. So we're gonna have great visibility with it.

And it was really easy to install in comparison with a lot of other vehicles because you can slide this right in the opening here in the front. So this is the size that I would recommend for anybody out there who has this particular style of Ford bumper. Included with the our kit, you do get a harness with all the wires for everything you need to get this powered up as well as its own switch. So that way you have the option to turn it on and off whenever you please Adding an additional light bar like this to the front of your vehicle is going to give you additional light so when it's dark outside, you're gonna be able to see better, but it's also really useful in inclement weather. They operate somewhat similar to a fog light in this position here.

So that's gonna help tear through some of that moisture that's out in the air so you can see better in the distance and ensure you get to your destination safely. And with such a long shooting wide beam that we have here, when you reach your campsite or your destination, if you have some equipment you need to set up, maybe some tables or tents or grills, whatever it is, you can pull this up to your campsite, turn the light on and have all the light you need because you show up maybe eight or nine o'clock at night. It's pretty dark out. You can still get everything ready so you're good to go in the morning so you can enjoy the most time as possible when you're out on vacation. We'll begin our installation by putting our side brackets on first, that way we know the exact size of this so we can figure out what's the best location and where it's gonna fit.

You're gonna have your little arms here. There's gonna be a cup opening. Inside that we placed the small Allen bolts and we did put one of the little flat washer or the little lock washers that come included with it on there. And if you look here, the ends here are kinda grooved, and this was what's gonna lock it in place in the set position. You can choose whatever position you want for this arm to angle your light. We're gonna be putting ours in pretty much a straight forward position for now. And then we're gonna see how it's gonna sit in the position that we wanted in. The Allen's key that I'm using here does come included with your kit. So you can just use that to tighten it down. Once you've got this one put on, we're gonna put the other one on the same way. I've already got it on there. And then just wanna check to make sure you've got them adjusted the same. So just go ahead and sit it on the ground. Give it a little rock, make sure that it's the same. Looks like we're pretty even there sitting flush on both sides. The place we're planning on putting ours is actually in the opening right here in the front of the vehicle. So let's just check fit here to make sure it is gonna work. So we're just gonna slide it in, work it over, and it looks like that's gonna fit just fine. Let's take a look at our light once we set it up right. And it does appear to that the brackets are gonna give us a decent height that's gonna let our light shine right through here. And it is actually gonna sit just a little bit higher on our final installation because the hardware that comes included with it for mounting on the other end of our legs does have rubber pads that go under it. So it's gonna boost it up, maybe another quarter of an inch. And then underneath, we're gonna go ahead and remove our panel here. This will give us some access we can draw out some holes. There's four bolts that we're gonna remove with an eight millimeter socket. Now you can do this in your driveway at home. You just have to lay on your back. We are on a lift here. Now we got all the bolts removed. We can just pull down on our panel and set it aside. Now we've got our panel out of the way, the push pins located here on each side, our frame is right here. So it's pretty much straight in front of the frame that runs down the side of the vehicle. We're gonna pop these pins out 'cause they line up very close to the spacing for our light. So we're just gonna pop that right out of there. That was the center of it. And then after you got the center out, pull out the rest and we're gonna do the same thing on the other side, and then if we take these holes here, we're gonna take a small Dremel tool or a file. Whatever you have available. And we want to grind out the inside edge here towards the center of the vehicle 'cause this holds very close but it's just a little bit too far apart. But if we we're to grind just a little bit out on each side, our light should line right up. So now we've got our holes drilled out, we can take the bolts that come in our kit. We're gonna drop it down through the top, and then we're gonna take the rubber pad that comes included with our kit. We're gonna place that on bottom. You are gonna have to push it through the little hole there and holds it pretty snug in there. And if we look at the shape of the bracket here, it is just large enough for the head of the bolt to sit down in there in a specific orientation. That's gonna keep this bolt from turning when we go to put the hardware on down below. So we don't need to worry about a wrench up top here when we snug it down. That's pretty nice. So we're just gonna bring this over now, we're gonna drop it down in our hole and we're gonna repeat that for the bolt over on the other side. So here you can see, here we've got our bolt pass through, We've done that on both sides. We are gonna take our drill bit, the grinding bit that we we're using just a minute ago and we're gonna remove a little bit more plastic before we secure it with the included lock washer and nut. And another thing we're also going to be doing is we're gonna add washers down here below. Since we do have a slotted hole, we wanna have a flat washer on it. So we wanna make sure we got enough ground out on the plastic here to where our washer is gonna sit flat on the bottom. We don't want any plastic in there 'cause plastic over time will compress. And what that means is that your hardware then it's gonna be loose and your light can start rattling. So we need to have nice solid surfaces. So here you can see we've got it ground out. We can place our bolt down in there, we can then grab the flat washer that we're adding, the lock washer and the nut, we're gonna place them on in that order. And it can be a little tricky because the bolt is just barely long enough, but it will work. We've got that rubber gasket on there, so that will compress just a little bit for us. And once we get this side started on here, we'll repeat the same procedure over on the other side. We're not gonna be on the inside because we need to feed our wiring in. On the inside in the lower left corner, we're over on the driver's side is a grommet. It's located behind the fuse box there. There's three bolts that hold the fuse box on. I pulled the carpet back here a little bit, and you may or may not. It depends on the type of carpet you have. With this RV, it's got the thicker material there. So we pulled that back just a little bit. There's three nuts on our fuse box. We have one on the right, one on the bottom and one on the left. The one on the bottom, you have to pull a wire off. the wire, it's just got a little plastic piece that goes on the studs. So just pull that off out of the way and then you can remove the nut. You'll remove each of these nuts with a 10 millimeter socket. Once we get these loose, we can pull our fuse box forward a little bit and that will let us safely pass our wires through the grommet. 'Cause we do wanna pull this out first if we go to pass some sharp through that ground, that we're just gonna be poking right into our fuse box. So we're doing this to be careful. Now on the outside, we're gonna remove the coolant bottle here. There are three bolts that holding on and we're gonna use an eight millimeter socket to remove these. Once you have all three removed, the bottle will just lift up, and we're just pulling it back just a little bit right out of the way. The grommet is accessed right behind it. We're gonna be taking a razor knife and making a small slit in the grommet to pass the flat connectors through that's on our switch. So we're just gonna come right here and just put a small incision right in our grommet just enough to be able to pass that end through. And that should be enough. If you can fit your finger in there, there's a good chance you could fit the connector through. And then we're just inside now and we're pushing it out through that opening. Once we've got it passed through, we can then come back out on the other side and pull any excess. But at this point you can just go ahead and leave it hanging right there because we're gonna have to mount the switch inside. And we don't really know yet how much excess we're gonna need until we figure out the exact location we're gonna put it. Next, we're gonna need to install the rest of the harness. There's a relay on one end. We're gonna put this over here by the battery. You'll see coming off of that, we've got our positive and negative cables with fuse protection in mind. You'll have a large harness that has female spade terminals at the end. We're gonna route those down towards our light and then we have another harness that we ran across the top here all the way over. And when you get to the end of this part of our harness, all it is is it's the other end of the connector that will plug in to our switch. So since we got it already routed over here, we've got our switch right here. We might as well just go ahead and plug these two together. They typically do come already plugged together. I had disconnected them to make it easier to feed it through the grommet. There we go. And then we'll of course we're gonna zip tie up all this loose wiring as we go. If you need zip ties, you can add those to your cart on checkout. Next, we're gonna go ahead and hook up our relay and get it mounted. We're also gonna grab the ground wire off of our kit 'cause if we look at the battery on this vehicle, you can see our negative post over here. It doesn't really have an optimal way to hook this to it. You really don't want to put it on there. Let me look at how big this ring terminal is. It would just slide off of there anyway. But those are not ideal to attach anything to, you want to attach it to a stud like this to where it's not interfering with how it crimps the battery. So the positive side, of course we're gonna go there. But the negative side, what we're gonna be doing is, is just putting it behind our relay. Just like this, we're gonna slide a self-tapping screw through both the relay bracket and the ground wire, and we're gonna run it into this bracket right here. This is grounded so we can get our ground directly from this. We'll use an eight millimeter socket to run this self-tapping screw in. This did not come included with the kit, you will have to provide your own which you can get here at etrailer. Now, our positive, I'm gonna wait to hook this up until we get our wires run. The other option, if you wanna hook it up right now, you could, but I would recommend pulling the fuse out of this box so that way you don't cause any shorts accidentally while we're running the rest of our wires. And our wiring here, we're just gonna drop straight down through the opening and then we can grab it down below and make our connection. We're now back up here at the front, your wires do come pre-stripped on your light. Go ahead and twist those. You can either cut the female terminals off of your harness here and connected them together, or you could put spade terminals on it and then just plug them together. The options up to you. You don't get the hardware in the kit to do that. So you will have to provide your own butt connectors or spade terminals to do so. To me, they do strip them back a little bit too far. So I am gonna strip off or cut off a little bit of this excess here as well before I connect my spade terminals to it. I think might just slide them on and crimp it down. Now we've got our connections made, we're just gonna match the colors, red and black wire on our harness, red and black wire on the light. So just match those colors together and plug them in. Sometimes it can be a little tricky because of the sheathings, but I do recommend sheathed spade terminals to ensure that there are no shorts and it will help keep out dirt, debris and moisture to help ensure a long lasting connection. We can not come back to our positive wire here, we're gonna connect it to the positive terminal, we're gonna remove the nut that's attached to it, 10 millimeter socket. And since this is such a small nut that comes included with it, you can actually see that it's smaller than our ring terminal here. We're gonna remove this power wire first. Now, if you don't have this extra power wire and stuff, then you'll just wanna make sure you add a washer to it to ensure that it's gonna hold that power wire on there without slipping over you. Well, then just put the nut back on and tighten it down. And now that we have everything hooked up, we're gonna test everything out before we clean it all up. So hit your button there on the inside and we can see that it comes on. If everything's working properly here, then you can go ahead and zip tie up any of your wiring. I recommend doing it to factory wiring 'cause it's already rotted in a way where it's not gonna encounter any moving components like steering suspension or anything excessively hot like your exhaust. So now we've got all of our wires bundled up in everything, everything's cleaned up, we can re-install any panels that we removed in reverse order of how we remove them. We can all stick our switch into position. I did put some rubbing alcohol on a rag. We're gonna clean up the area to ensure that we have good adhesion. And you can put it really wherever you'd like. It doesn't really matter. We're gonna be putting ours just right here next to our steering column, just underneath. There's a double-sided adhesive on the back. So now we're gonna put our switch into place. We're gonna be mounting it in this orientation here, and we're just gonna stick it on just like that. Now, you wanna keep in mind that this switch here does have the LEDs illuminated all the time regardless of your position. So if you do store this for a long time, this could discharge your battery. So I would recommend disconnecting the battery in extended periods of storage. And that completes our installation of MaxxTow LED light bar on our 2021 Ford F 450..